Socioeconomic Stratification in the U.S.

This research will examine the ability of Marxian and Weberian conceptions of class to explain patterns of socioeconomic stratification in the U.S., with reference to the roles and interplay of race, ethnicity, and gender in shaping patterns of class stratification in the U.S. The research will set forth the conceptions of class held by Marx and Weber, respectively, and then discuss how each theorist's view of class accounts for social and economic divisions within the American social structure.

Marxian ideology holds that throughout history there has been a constant struggle, manifested in interclass struggle, between individual experience and social structures that shape that experience: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Marx, Manifesto 50). The struggles are shaped by the relative position of the working class and bourgeoisie, identified with mercantilist-industrial interests that control the means or relations of industrial production (Marx, Grundrisse 227), frequently referred to simply as capital. Oppression is embedded into the very fact of social rank. In the industrial period or bourgeois epoch (Manifesto 54), however, social rank is identified not with the difference between (say) aristocrat and serf, where a sentimental veneer attaches to human relationships, but rather with the concentration and centralization of "means of production, and . . . property in a few hands" (Manifesto 56). In the process, says the Manife

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young men, had at least high school education, and 29% had at least a baccalaureate degree bachelor's degree or more, compared to 26% for men (Women's). In other words, education alone does not determine economic success; another dynamic is at work. On the Weberian and Marxist view, the economic differential explains why education does not make socioeconomic difference for women, even in the context of progress for them. Money, especially when more of it is concentrated with men, is more valued and privileged by society, hence more values women's work. Another view of the connection between Marxism and gendered interpretations of social structure can be seen in the discourse of feminism, which is itself divided in its social theory. Gendered social analysis that is consistent with Marxist theory is exemplified by such commentators as MacKinnon, who likens her method to Marxism because it is a theory of "totality . . . of a fundamental and critical underpinning of the whole [it] envision[s]" (49), which analyzes women (as Marx analyzes workers) "as a social group, not in individualist, naturalist, idealist, moralist, voluntarist, or harmonist terms" (60). A view hostile to such analysis is held by those (e.g., Ms. Paglia B4) nota

Category: Psychology - S